Puritans Wouldn’t Eat Pussy, So They Invented the Western

How a sex problem became a propaganda machine, and how that machine built the most durable myth in American culture.

You can tell how much a society values women by how much it prioritizes their pleasure, and I don't just mean in bed, though that turns out to be a remarkably honest place to start looking. A culture that treats a woman's body as something that exists for her own satisfaction is, as a rule, a culture that extends her some version of that same logic everywhere else. Autonomy over land, over labor, over her own children, over whether she stays married to someone. A culture that treats her pleasure as irrelevant, or worse, as dangerous, tends to extend that logic everywhere else too.

Colonial America in the 1600s and 1700s had two systems running side by side. Puritan society, where sex was a procreative duty and a woman’s satisfaction did not register as a category worth discussing. And a number of Native American societies, where female sexual autonomy was an accepted, parent-sanctioned norm, alongside legal autonomy, property rights, and the ability to leave a bad marriage without asking anyone’s permission.

Colonial women got to make that comparison, and a significant number of them chose Native life over their own. Not once. Repeatedly, across decades, across colonies, with women being recaptured and escaping again. They were telling Puritan society something, as clearly as a person can tell you something without ever publishing a word. Give us autonomy. Give us a say in our own pleasure, our own property, our own marriages, and we will stay.

The reaction of the Puritan men is a shining example of how religious white males handle everything: poorly.

---

They Knew Why Women Were Leaving

Reluctantly, we must start with the men who were actually paying attention at the time, because their own words are the best evidence here.

Benjamin Franklin wrote a private letter to Peter Collinson in 1753 describing exactly this phenomenon. He noted that colonists assumed people who went to live with Native communities had been “captured,” when in fact “more often the whites took up Indian life without compulsion” [1]. Franklin wasn’t being charitable to Native people here. He was being honest about a pattern he had personally observed and could not explain away.

What he wrote next is a clear indictment of the world Puritan women were leaving behind:

“When white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life… and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them” [1].

Cadwallader Colden, a colonial scholar contemporaries considered one of the best-informed men in the New World on British American affairs, documented the same thing in his 1747 history of the Iroquois nations:

“No Arguments, no Intreaties, nor Tears of their friends and relationships, could persuade many of them that were by the Caressings of their relationships persuaded to come home” [2].

In modern speak, Colden was essentially saying that begging, pleading, and showering ‘captives’ with affection was ineffective at persuading people to return home from the Iroquois nations.

This was not a handful of isolated incidents. Conservative estimates place the number of colonists taken captive by Native tribes in New England alone, between roughly 1675 and 1763, somewhere between 1,600 and 2,500 people [3]. Of those, historians estimate return rates as low as 40-60 percent, with women and children returning at significantly lower rates than men [3].

The imbalance shows exactly who had more to gain by leaving Puritan society.

---

What Women Tell Us

Unfortunately, very few accounts by women from this period survive to the modern day. However, there are a few notable examples that give us insight into what was happening.

Eunice Williams

Eunice was seven years old when she was taken during the 1704 raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, one of the largest French and Indian raids on a New England settlement during Queen Anne’s War [4]. Her father, John Williams, a Puritan minister, was also captured in the raid and was ransomed back to the colony fairly quickly. He wrote his own captivity narrative, The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion (1707), which became one of the most widely read books in the colonies [5].

John Williams published this memoir of his own captivity to wide readership. His daughter Eunice, who chose to permanently stay with the Mohawk, left behind no memoir of her own.

Eunice was adopted into a Mohawk family, baptized Catholic, renamed Marguerite, and eventually married a Mohawk man [4]. Her family spent literal decades trying to get her back. She visited her biological relatives a handful of times as an adult. She never returned permanently. She lived out her entire life as a Mohawk woman.

Historian John Demos wrote an entire Bancroft Prize-winning book about her, titled The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (1994) [6]. Notice the title. That is her father’s framing of her life, not hers. By every indication available, Eunice considered herself exactly where she wanted to be.

Mary Jemison

Mary Jemison was fifteen when she was taken in a Shawnee and French raid near her family’s home in Pennsylvania, in the spring of 1758. She watched the raiding party kill and scalp her parents and siblings. She was the one taken alive [7].

She was not kept as a trophy. She was kept as a replacement. The two Seneca women who received her had recently lost a brother in the war, and had traveled to Fort Pitt specifically to collect a captive to take his place, as was custom. Mary was handed over to fill a dead man’s seat in his own family [7a]. This custom is something that I expand on later in this piece.

What that adoption actually gave her is the part Puritan society could not have offered her under any circumstances. She married, first a Delaware man she described with real affection, and after his death, a Seneca man. She had children with both. She learned the language. She became, over the decades, a landowner, and by the 1790s she was negotiating directly with American land agents on behalf of the Seneca, helping secure better terms for her people at the Treaty of Big Tree in 1797 [8a]. A woman who left a Puritan-adjacent colonial household at fifteen ended her life with land, a voice in council, and a seat at a negotiating table. No Puritan woman of her generation got anywhere near that. Coverture did not allow it. Theology did not allow it. The entire legal architecture of colonial womanhood was built to ensure it never became a question.

She was offered her ‘freedom’ more than once, even as an adult, when her children were grown. She said no every time, and at least once, she did more than refuse; she actively sabotaged the attempt. A trader named Van Sice tried to arrange her return to white society, and Jemison worked to foil the plan herself [7f].

When she explained her reasoning late in life, fear of rejection was only one part, not the largest. She did say she worried her relatives “would despise [my Indian children] if not myself; and treat us as enemies; or, at least with a degree of cold indifference, which I thought I could not endure” [7]. This is often cited, but the fuller record of her life makes clear this was not a woman cowering from an unwelcoming world she’d been exiled from. She referred to her own house, her own farmland, in language that was unmistakably possessive, “my house,” “my flats,” the vocabulary of a woman who owned what she had and knew it [7f]. She held standing in her community. She had, by every account, a secure and powerful identity as a Seneca woman, one that came with land rights, a political voice, and a domestic authority no Puritan wife could claim over her own household [7f].

Jemison dictated her account in 1823, at around eighty years old, to a man named James Seaver, a country doctor and occasional minister practicing in upstate New York [7b, 7c]. She could not read or write English, though she spoke it fluently [7e]. Seaver published the result the following year as A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, written in the first person, in her voice, as though it were her own hand on the page [7e].

It was not her hand on the page. It was his.

An eighty-year-old woman spoke her life story aloud across a single set of interviews to a man with whom she had no prior relationship, who then went home, organized her words into chapters, smoothed them into publishable English prose, and released them under her name. She never saw a draft. She never corrected a line. She had no capacity to, since she could not read what he had written, even if a copy had been placed in her hands. Whatever Seaver chose to emphasize, soften, omit, or rephrase became, permanently and irreversibly, “her” story. Scholars have spent two centuries arguing about how much of the text is Jemison and how much is Seaver, and the honest answer is that nobody can fully separate the two, because she was never given the chance to [7d].

She still managed to tell us what mattered to her anyway. She praised her husbands’ kindness. She described attention to her physical comfort in terms Puritan domestic life had no language for. June Namias, who edited the modern scholarly edition of the text, called her “a very real figure affirming the possibility that whites and Indians might have lived together peacefully” [8].

Jemison’s 1824 narrative is the closest thing we have to a direct account from a woman who chose to stay, though even this was dictated to a male ghostwriter, James Seaver, and shaped for a white reading audience.

Frances Slocum

Frances Slocum was five years old when she was taken from her family in Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley by Delaware warriors in 1778 [9]. Her family searched for her for decades, literally decades, before finally locating her in 1837, fifty-nine years later, living as a Miami woman in Indiana with a Miami husband, children, and grandchildren.

Her biological siblings traveled to find her. She received them politely. She told them she was home. She declined to leave and stayed in that community until her death in 1847 [9], having lived 69 years as a Miami woman and exactly 5 as a white settler’s daughter.

The Forced Returns of 1764

In 1764, following British victory in the French and Indian War, Colonel Henry Bouquet led a military operation that extracted roughly two hundred captives from Native communities in Pennsylvania and Ohio by force, as a condition of peace [10]. Bouquet’s own report describes this as obliging Native communities to give up captives, “including the Children Born from White Women married to Savages” [10].

Obliged. He used the language of compulsion because compulsion is exactly what it took.

A contemporary account from the period, published in the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, describes what happened during this forced extraction: “Several women, when compelled to return, soon made their escape to the woods, preferring wigwams to their native homes… Many captives, when given up to Bouquet and bound fast to prevent their escape, sat sullen and scowling that they were forced back into society” [11].

Bound fast. Tied up. To prevent them from running back to a life they had freely chosen, toward men colonial society had taught them to view as savages, away from a “civilization” they had personally lived inside of and rejected.

Colonial men forcibly removed women under the guise of rescue and then physically restrained them from returning to a life that they preferred.

---

Orgasms Were Part of the Equation

The standard academic explanation for why women stayed focuses on labor structure and legal status, and those factors are real. Many Iroquois nations were matrilineal. Women owned the household. Women held political voice through clan mother councils that could select or remove male chiefs entirely [12]. Property passed through the maternal line. In many of these societies, a woman could initiate and finalize a divorce on her own terms.

Compare that to a Puritan wife under English common law. Coverture meant she had no independent legal existence at all once married. Her property became her husband’s property. Her body, her labor, her children, all of it existed legally as an extension of him. She could not own anything in her own name. She could not leave a marriage on her own initiative, regardless of what happened inside it.

But the legal structure is only half the story.

Puritan sexual theology treated sex as a marital duty oriented entirely around procreation. While female sexual pleasure wasn’t explicitly condemned, there is theological writing from the period suggesting that a woman who enjoyed sex too much was making herself more susceptible to spiritual corruption, more available to the devil [13]. I wish I could say this cold indifference to female satisfaction is a relic of the past, but Ben Shapiro made us all, against our will, aware that this issue persists even today.

The ethnographic and historical record provides a much more favorable account of Native American cultures during this time period. For tribes including the Cherokee and Huron, sexuality was not bound to ideas of sin or societal shame [14]. Young unmarried women could engage in sexual activity with their parents’ active encouragement, and a woman using her own body as she pleased was treated as a legitimate and accepted form of personal expression [14].

Nobody in the seventeenth century was writing down the specifics of what happened between a colonial woman and her Native husband in bed. That document does not exist, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. What exists is the framework on both sides: one culture that structurally erased a woman’s pleasure from existing, and one culture that structurally treated it as normal. You do not need the missing document to draw the obvious conclusion.

It went further than tolerance in at least one documented case. Among the Wendat, a confederacy closely related to the Huron, a French missionary living among them in the 1620s recorded a communal healing ceremony called the endakwandet. If a sick or troubled woman requested it, the women of her town would gather at her bedside, and each would be asked in turn which man she wanted to spend the night with. The chosen men were notified and arrived that evening, and the encounters took place inside the lodge through the night while the rest of the community sang and kept ceremony around them [15a]. A separate account from 1639 describes a dying man requesting the same ceremony for himself, with the community publicly soliciting volunteers and celebrating everyone who came forward [15a]. The Wendat language had no word for “innocence” or “guilt” as applied to sex [15a]. This was not a private indulgence tolerated at the margins. It was organized, public, and treated as medicine.

Jemison’s own language, again, about her husband’s kindness and their attention to her physical comfort, is about as close as the record gets to a woman saying the quiet part out loud, filtered as it was through a male ghostwriter’s pen [7]. Make of that what you will.

There is also a queerer layer to this entire story that almost never makes it into the conversation. More than 150 documented pre-colonial Native tribes recognized third gender roles and accepted same sex relationships as a normal part of community life [15]. European colonizers were openly scandalized by it. As early as the sixteenth century, Europeans recorded shock at what one historian describes as “predominantly homosexual” two-spirit sexual expression among Native communities [16]. Christian colonizers used this as one more justification to frame Native people as fundamentally degenerate, which fed directly into the same dehumanization project this entire article is tracing [15].

For a colonial woman who was attracted to women, Puritan society offered exactly two options: erase that part of yourself, or be destroyed for it. A number of Native societies offered an entirely different third option, one where that identity was not just tolerated but spiritually honored. We do not have named case studies of colonial women who left specifically for this reason, because the colonial record was never going to preserve that story. But the cultural conditions that would have made it possible were real, were documented, and were systematically erased by the same propaganda machine I am about to describe.

---

Captivity Narrative: A Legendary White Male Tantrum

While the numbers are shaky, we can ascertain that a LOT of women were far more interested in Native American life than being Mrs. Jebidiah Smith. Why? Because you do not construct an entire literary genre, with ministers as editors and publishers, deployed at scale and with deliberate political timing, to solve a small problem. You build that infrastructure because the problem is existential to your social order.

The captivity narrative is widely considered the first literary genre to grow directly out of the American colonial experience for an American colonial readership, and it is also notable for being dominated by women’s stories at a time when almost nothing else in print was [17]. That combination was not an accident. Women were the ones being adopted into tribal family structures and forming real attachments. Men captured in raids were more often killed or quickly ransomed. The “women leaving and not coming back” problem was specifically a women’s behavior problem, which means the propaganda response had to specifically target women’s behavior.

Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 narrative is the founding text of the genre, and the story of how it reached print tells you everything. Rowlandson was taken during King Philip’s War in 1675 and held for eleven weeks. Her own account, where it survives intact, describes being fed by her captors and observing Wampanoag domestic life with something closer to curiosity than terror. But her narrative was edited and published by Puritan minister Increase Mather, with a preface and framing that turned her experience into a story of divine testing, temptation, and triumphant redemption through faith [18]. The book became what historians consider America’s first bestseller, and it was explicitly popular in Puritan settlements specifically because it was framed as a tale of “danger, temptation, and ultimate redemption through belief in God” [18].

This was not a one-off. Scholars who study the genre directly, Kathryn Derounian-Stodola and James Levernier among them, have stated plainly that “anti-Indian propaganda became a major motivation for writing and publishing captivities” [19]. That is the mainstream scholarly consensus on why this genre exists in its current form.

The editorial hand was not subtle. Scholarship on the genre describes a direct, ongoing tension where “ministers’ attempts to promote the Puritan covenant conflicted with the individual salvation testimonies of the female captives,” and where “white male editors attempted to impose white cultural values on the female stories, while the captives’ experiences reflected acculturation and integration into Indian society” [20]. Translation: the women’s lived experience kept contradicting the lesson the church wanted to teach, and the editors won every time because they held the printing press.

There is also a documented, specific motivation tied to the exact phenomenon I am tracing in this article. Scholar Teresa Toulouse has argued that New England ministers specifically promoted women’s captivity narratives, the published, redemption-framed kind, in order to counter the spread of stories about women who were converting to Catholicism or marrying into French or Native communities and choosing not to come back [21]. The propaganda was not a generalized fear campaign. It was a targeted response to a known and named problem: women like Eunice Williams.

---

The Damsel in Distress of the West

The damsel-in-distress trope existed before any of this in European literature, but it was largely aristocratic and allegorical, a knight rescuing a noblewoman, built around honor and class within a shared culture. It was not about race. It was not about territory.

The Puritan captivity narrative took that old archetype and rebuilt it from the inside. It made the captured woman specifically white. It made her captor specifically non-white. And it made her rescue a civilizational obligation rather than a personal one. Saving her stopped being an act of chivalry and became an act of claiming the continent. Her body became the symbolic border between civilization and savagery, and rescuing her became functionally identical to justifying expansion onto the land she had been taken into.

That template did not stay in the seventeenth century. It is directly traceable through dime novels of the 1860s through 1890s, where the kidnapped white woman was routinely the central plot engine of the entire genre [22]. It is traceable through Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, which staged live reenactments of white women being rescued from Native warriors as popular public entertainment. It is traceable through early silent film, which adapted those same dime novel plots wholesale, and through the classical Hollywood Western, where the captive white woman became one of the most reliable stock characters in the entire genre [23]. It is still traceable today, every single time a movie uses a woman’s capture as the inciting incident for a man’s violence.

The 1914 serial “The Perils of Pauline” is the literal origin of the “tied to the tracks” damsel cliché, a direct descendant of the captivity narrative’s white-woman-in-danger template, now stripped of its original religious framing and sold as pure entertainment.

---

Consequences of the Captivity Narrative

Historians who study this genre specifically have spent decades tracing exactly where this narrative spread, and the answer is: everywhere. For three hundred years. And it has not stopped.

Richard Slotkin, in his Bancroft Prize-winning study of the American frontier myth, argues that the captivity narrative did not just function as propaganda aimed at Native people. It functioned as self-absolution. One reading of his work puts it plainly: the genre evolved specifically to let Puritans process both their symbolic break from their own English heritage and their actual violence against the people whose land they were taking, by reframing both as something they suffered through rather than something they chose [22a]. Literary scholar Kathryn Derounian-Stodola goes further and calls the captivity narrative the foundation text of American culture itself, the place where contact between colonist and Native inevitably had to evolve into conflict and then conquest, because that is the only story the genre was built to tell [22a].

Journalist Susan Faludi, in her book on the cultural response to September 11, traces the captivity narrative directly into the present and names it as what she calls the formative American ideal, the story the country reaches for every time it feels threatened [23a]. Her argument is specific: after 2001, the country did not invent a new myth to process its fear. It reached for the old one. American culture recast itself around a heroic male rescuer saving a helpless woman from a dark-skinned, non-Christian threat, the exact architecture built three hundred years earlier to sell Mary Rowlandson’s story [23a]. The clearest example she names is the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch in Iraq, a story the media built and shaped specifically to fit the rescue template, regardless of what Lynch herself actually experienced [23b].

Faludi also names the woman the myth needed to erase to keep functioning. Hannah Duston, a Puritan woman captured in a 1697 raid, escaped her Abenaki captors not by waiting to be rescued but by killing them herself and fleeing by canoe [23c]. She does not fit the template. A woman who saves herself does not need a man to save her, and a myth built entirely around the necessity of male rescue has no use for her. She has one isolated, little-visited statue. The men who waited to be rescued gave rise to an entire literary genre and, eventually, a national identity.

Cynthia Ann Parker was a real woman taken captive by Comanches in the 1830s. She came to prefer life among them, and when white society eventually located and “rescued” her decades later, she fought bitterly against the rescue and the forced return [23c]. Her actual story, a woman who chose to stay and resisted being taken back, was rewritten for popular audiences as the 1956 film The Searchers, in which John Wayne plays a man rescuing a girl modeled on her, recast as a helpless captive grateful for deliverance [23c]. The real woman refused to be saved. The myth saved her anyway, because the myth was never actually about her. It was about what the men who built it needed to believe about themselves.

They Were Harmed First, and the Captives Still Chose to Stay

There is an obvious point that needs to be addressed here. Native Americans were taking people captive, that was not made up. However, the context surround why this was occurring is often completely ignored.

By the time large-scale captive taking was happening in New England, Native populations had already been reduced by an estimated fifty to ninety percent in some regions due to European disease [24]. Many of the raids that followed, particularly among the Iroquois nations, were part of an established practice called the mourning war, in which captives were taken specifically to be adopted into families that had lost members to disease and warfare, to replace those who had died [24]. The captive taking was a documented attempt to rebuild what colonization had already destroyed.

Even inside that response to harm, women still chose to stay. These were communities formed in the aftermath of catastrophe, raiding to survive their own near-erasure, and the colonial women who ended up inside them by force still looked at the men running their own society back home and chose differently. Native men, inside communities built out of grief and adoption and active warfare, treated their captives better than Christian men treated their own wives.

---

Sources

[1] Benjamin Franklin to Peter Collinson, May 9, 1753. Cited in Johansen, Bruce E. Forgotten Founders: Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois and the Rationale for the American Revolution, Chapter 5. https://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/FFchp5.html

[2] Colden, Cadwallader. The History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada (1747). Quoted in “Captivity Narratives and the Positions of Female Identity in Colonial America.” St. John Fisher University. https://fisherpub.sjf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1077&context=nepca

[3] “Captivity Narratives and the Positions of Female Identity in Colonial America.” St. John Fisher University. https://fisherpub.sjf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1077&context=nepca

[4] “Indian Captives.” History of American Women. https://www.womenhistoryblog.com/category/indian-captives

[5] “Captivity Narratives.” Women & the American Story, New York Historical Society. https://wams.nyhistory.org/primary-source/captivity-narratives/

[6] Demos, John. The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America. Vintage, 1994. https://www.amazon.com/Unredeemed-Captive-Family-Story-America/dp/0679759611

[7] Wikipedia. “Mary Jemison.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Jemison

[7a] “A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison.” World History Commons, quoting the 1824 narrative directly on the circumstances of her adoption. https://worldhistorycommons.org/narrative-life-mrs-mary-jemison

[7b] “JAMES E. SEAVER.” William G. Pomeroy Foundation, historical marker biography. https://www.wgpfoundation.org/historic-markers/james-e-seaver/

[7c] Find a Grave Memorial, “Dr James E Seaver (1787-1827).” https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/93229151/james-e-seaver

[7d] “A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison.” Broadview Press edition description, on the mediated and intertextual nature of the narrative and Seaver’s editorial role. https://broadviewpress.com/product/a-narrative-of-the-life-of-mrs-mary-jemison/

[7e] “A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison.” Syracuse University Press, on Jemison’s inability to read or write English despite fluency in speaking it. https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/1733/narrative-of-the-life-of-mrs-mary-jemison-a

[7f] “Jemison, Mary (1742-1833).” Encyclopedia.com, on Jemison foiling trader Van Sice’s attempt to return her to white society, and on the secure, powerful identity and domestic authority she held as a Seneca woman. https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/jemison-mary-1742-1833

[8] Namias, June, ed. Introduction to A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison. Cited via Skidmore College Creative Matter. https://creativematter.skidmore.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=eng_stu_schol

[8a] Wikipedia. “Mary Jemison,” on her role negotiating for the Seneca at the Treaty of Big Tree, 1797. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Jemison

[9] “Indian Captives.” History of American Women. https://www.womenhistoryblog.com/category/indian-captives

[10] Bouquet, Henry, quoted in Colonial Records of Pennsylvania, Vol. 9, p. 207. Cited in “Red Man’s Squaw: The Return of White Female Captives & their Native-American Children.” Historical Society of Pennsylvania. https://hsp.org/blogs/hidden-histories/red-mans-squaw-the-return-of-white-female-captives-their-native-american-children

[11] Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, archived account on captives preferring Native life. https://search.library.wisc.edu/digital/ALNXBUTCEAWT4L8U/text/ASA6726LD2RVJW8H

[12] “Endearing and Enduring: Southeastern Native American Perspectives on Sexuality, Gender, and Marriage.” Tuckasegee Valley Historical Review. https://affiliate.wcu.edu/tuckasegeevalleyhistoricalreview/spring-2018/endearing-and-enduring-southeastern-native-american-perspectives-on-sexuality-gender-and-marriage/

[13] Solomon, Richard. “Sexual Practice and Fantasy in Colonial America and the Early Republic.” IU Journal of Undergraduate Research, 2017. https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/iujur/article/view/23364

[14] “Defining Native American Sexuality.” Fifty Shades of Sexuality in American History, Virginia Tech. https://blogs.lt.vt.edu/50shades/2017/01/26/defining-native-american-sexuality/

[15] “The Impact of Colonization on the Role of Native American Women.” University of Wisconsin. https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~caitlin/papers/native.htm

[15a] Steckley, John. “For Native Americans, Sex Didn’t Come With Guilt.” Fair Observer, March 30, 2015, citing the 1620s observations of Brother Gabriel Sagard and the 1639 account of Jesuit Father Jerome Lalemant on the Wendat endakwandet ceremony. https://www.fairobserver.com/region/north_america/for-native-americans-sex-didnt-come-with-guilt-21347/

[16] “One Barrier to Two-Spirit History: Settler Archives.” JSTOR Daily, citing historian Gregory D. Smithers. https://daily.jstor.org/one-barrier-to-two-spirit-history-settler-archives

[17] “Captivity Narratives.” Women & the American Story, New York Historical Society. https://wams.nyhistory.org/early-encounters/english-colonies/captivity-narratives/

[18] “Captivity Narratives.” Women & the American Story, New York Historical Society. https://wams.nyhistory.org/early-encounters/english-colonies/captivity-narratives/

[19] Derounian-Stodola, Kathryn, and James Levernier. Quoted in Project MUSE, “Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes as Captivity Narrative.” https://muse.jhu.edu/article/513508/summary

[20] “Female Captivity Narratives in Colonial America.” Gettysburg Historical Journal, Vol. 8, Article 4, 2009. https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1079&context=ghj

[21] Toulouse, Teresa. The Captive’s Position: Female Narrative, Male Identity, and Royal Authority in Colonial New England. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Cited in “Female Captivity Narratives in Colonial America.” Gettysburg Historical Journal. https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1079&context=ghj

[22] “Exhume the Stories: Women Captives in the American West.” Myths of the American West. https://mythsoftheamericanwest.wordpress.com/2015/11/13/exhume-the-stories-women-captives-in-the-american-west/

[23] Namias, June. White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier. University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Cited via eNotes. https://www.enotes.com/topics/captivity-narratives/criticism/criticism-overviews-999665/june-namias-essay-date-1993

[22a] “American Captivity.” The Hedgehog Review, citing Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1973), and Kathryn Derounian-Stodola, Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives. https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/political-mythologies/articles/american-captivity

[23a] “Interview: Susan Faludi on 9/11 Myths.” Newsweek, on Faludi’s The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (Metropolitan Books, 2007). https://www.newsweek.com/interview-susan-faludi-911-myths-103359

[23b] “Susan Faludi: America’s Terror Dream.” The Nation, on the media’s construction of the Jessica Lynch rescue narrative. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/susan-faludi-americas-terror-dream/

[23c] “Susan Faludi: America’s Terror Dream.” The Nation, on Hannah Duston and Cynthia Ann Parker, and the rewriting of Parker’s story into The Searchers (1956). https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/susan-faludi-americas-terror-dream/

[24] “Historicizing Sexual Violence Against Native American Women.” Scripps College Senior Theses, citing Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2297&context=scripps_theses